July 9, 2018 Arts & Culture The Legend of Joaquín Murieta: A History of Racialized Violence By Hsuan L. Hsu Like its elusive hero, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854) is difficult to pin down. It has the distinction of being the first novel published in California, the first novel published by a Native American, and the first American novel to feature a Mexican protagonist. Its story draws together transformational events in the history of three nations, connecting the California gold rush with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Mexican-American War. It blends elements of epic, folktale, revenge tragedy, and romance—yet historians have often treated it as a factual record. It has been repurposed, and sometimes plagiarized, throughout the U.S., Mexico, Europe, and Latin America; in publications ranging from the California Police Gazette to the popular Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta), a play by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; and the 1998 Hollywood film The Mask of Zorro (in which Joaquín’s brother, played by Antonio Banderas, takes up the mask of Zorro). While few Americans today would recognize the name of Joaquín Murieta, most are familiar with figures such as Zorro and Batman, whose creators were inspired by this sensational account of vigilante justice and righteous violence. Paradoxically, John Rollin Ridge’s book (published under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird) has become both one of the most influential and one of the most invisible novels in the history of American literature. Read More
July 6, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bandits, Revenge, and Decapitated Animals By The Paris Review Mona Chalabi is the data editor for the Guardian’s U.S. branch. Her beautiful Instagram account is a mixture of data, visual art, and, taken together, a kind of self-portrait in infographics, illustrating Chalabi’s preoccupations, curiosity, neuroses, politics, and sense of humor. You’ll find a chart on the “Probability of a White Christmas” (at least one inch of snow) from Michigan to South Carolina, and another of an outstretched leg, illustrating the downward slope in pantyhose sales in Japan. The caffeine content of various beverages is represented by stretched-open bloodshot eyeballs. Another chart, of penises, represents the “Average Time to Ejaculate During Vaginal Penetration”: “Median = 5.4 minutes”—though her caption notes, “This data comes from 500 heterosexual men in monogamous relationships for at least 6 months. So, not exactly representative. And it was collected by asking them to use a stopwatch which you’d think would kill the mood at least a bit. But still, interesting, no?” Yes. Also interesting: the spike in people googling “Will I Die Alone” around Valentine’s Day; the number of decapitated animals found in New York parks (with chickens and pigeons in the lead, ahead of goats and cats); the degree to which Trump campaign contributors profit from his policy of detaining immigrants; and the current disparity in earnings between black and white Americans. Some aren’t charts at all, just facts and drawings, like the one of two hands being pulled apart—one big, one small—posted alongside the fact that 1,995 children were separated from 1,940 adults at the United States–Mexico border between April 19 and May 31 of this year. Some artists are perfectly suited to the visual medium of Instagram. Others provide you with information that may broaden your perspective or at least redeem your procrastination. If these two types are in a Venn diagram, with varying amounts of overlap, then Mona Chalabi is a total eclipse. —Brent Katz Read More
July 6, 2018 Bulletin A Send-Off to Nicole Rudick By The Paris Review After eight years as managing editor, and editing the last two issues as interim editor, Nicole Rudick has decided to leave The Paris Review. Our staff is small, and Nicole’s role, like so many of ours, extended far beyond that which is simply captured by job titles: she promoted new writers and artists, curated portfolios and conducted interviews for the magazine, edited and wrote pieces for the Daily, produced special projects—like our reinvigorated Paris Review Editions imprint and the Big, Bent Ears series—and so much more. We’ll miss her dry humor, strongly held opinions, hard-earned praise, and surprisingly colorful dress shoes. She has been equal parts tough and nurturing, a mentor to many who have passed through these doors. The day after the 2016 election, when many of us were crying quietly at our desks, Nicole gathered everyone around the pool table for a meeting. Then she turned on the music and encouraged us to dance. Read More
July 6, 2018 Arts & Culture First Woman Wins the Strega Prize in Fifteen Years By Francesco Pacifico Helena Janeczek won the Strega Prize, Italy’s biggest literary prize, on Thursday night. The last time a woman won was in 2003, fifteen years ago. Janeczek, who was born and raised in Germany by a Polish family, writes passionately about history and how hard it is to pin down the truth. The book that won the prize, La ragazza con la Leica, is a work of nonfiction about Gerda Taro, the young woman photographer who died in the Spanish Civil War just before her twenty-seventh birthday. Women were well represented on this year’s long list and short list, and excitement brewed that a woman might win. Before the award ceremony, the feminist intellectual and author Loredana Lipperini wrote that voters shouldn’t treat this as a token #MeToo win. The day before the ceremony, I got on the phone with Janeczek, who was my favorite in the short list, and asked her if she felt that this year was going to be different. Read More
July 6, 2018 The Big Picture When Female Artists Stop Being Seen as Muses By Cody Delistraty On the work of Gabriele Münter. Gabriele Münter, Fräulein Ellen im Gras, 1934. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, some twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen on the shore of the Øresund, has a sense of porousness—glass and light everywhere, so many doors between the museum and the sculpture park that inside and outside lose their distinction. There are exhibitions on the Los Angeles–based artist Ed Ruscha and on Pablo Picasso’s surprisingly prolific work with ceramics, but the reason I’ve come is to see a two-floor exhibition on the life and career of Gabriele Münter. The exhibition, devoted wholly to the sixty-year career of the underknown Berlin-born German Expressionist, includes around a hundred thirty of her works. But before you’re able to focus on her aesthetic breakthroughs—on the way in which she positioned and profiled and photographed women, on her František Kupka–level jumps in artistic style—social conditioning dictates that you look first at the shadow of her long-term lover, the better-known Wassily Kandinsky. History, of course, tends to take for granted that women have been influenced by the men in their lives while the very same men aren’t seen as having been influenced by these women. Viewing art has tended toward the same effect: lonely men are “lone geniuses” while lonely women, those who devote themselves to their art at the expense of love or family, are “art monsters.” Read More
July 5, 2018 Out of Print The Rare Women in the Rare-Book Trade By Diane Mehta From left: Belle da Costa Greene, Heather O’Donnell, and Bryn Hoffman. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway picks up the phone and receives a solo lunch-party invite intended for her husband, from another woman. Clarissa puts down the phone and reels over “the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered.” Mrs. Dalloway, a book about an aging woman who is no longer valued by society, has increased in value as it has aged. The corrected 1928 typescript, with Woolf’s musings scribbled on its pages, now sells for £27,500. What is a woman worth as she ages? What is a book by a woman worth as it ages? The answers are braided into the realities of the book trade, which is still an old boys’ club. As you’d expect, the expensive books are by men: Joyce, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. “No twentieth-century women command those prices,” said Heather O’Donnell, owner of Honey & Wax Booksellers. “Woolf tops out in the mid five figures, and Gertrude Stein and Zora Neale Hurston are relatively cheap.” Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market. Read More